Off the Wall: Is something wrong with Ichiro?

Ichiro's batting average has dropped below .300, and many fans are wondering if it's time to be concerned. Because Ichiro doesn't hit many home runs, like an average right fielder, and doesn't take a lot of walks (without which he can't steal as many bases), he's only helping the team defensively without a high batting average.

As I write this before Wednesday's game, Ichiro is 5-for-28 in his last seven games (.179) -- and that's an improvement for this month. His monthly averages are almost as disturbing, seemingly showing a terrible drop-off in his game:

April: .356 (36-for-101)
May: .288 (32-for-111)
June: .174 (8-for-46)

Ichiro has had bad months before in his major league career. In April 2004, he hit .255, and in June, .274. In 2003, he seemed to wear down badly at the end of the season, hitting .242 in August and .273 in September.

There are a couple obvious theories as to why this has happened. He may be tired, to name the most obvious. Manager Mike Hargrove hasn't given Ichiro a day off yet this season (also true for Randy Winn and Raul Ibanez). I know Ichiro's a gamer and all, but it would seem like a day off couldn't make things worse.

Statistically, it's hard to find anything telling. Ichiro's stats are down a little in day games but way down in night games. Sometimes that's a sign of vision problems -- picking up the ball in the artificial light -- and can be solved by contact lenses, but I have a hard time believing Ichiro's problems are related to his eyes.

He's not hitting nearly as well this year with runners on base. Of course, it's not as if the bottom of this year's lineup has given him a lot of chances. Still, Ichiro's enjoyed a deserved reputation as a fearsome hitter with men on, as a hitter who can slap the ball into the holes created when fielders cover their bases instead of playing in their natural fielding positions. This year, he hasn't done that at all:

2004
No one on: .376 in 476 at-bats
Runners on: .364 in 228 at-bats

2005
No one on: .339 in 174 at-bats
Runners on: .200 in 80 at-bats

The problem with getting into this kind of deli-slicing of statistics is the size of the sample. The smaller the comparison, the less sure we can be about our conclusions.

For instance, I had a quarter on my desk (a 1988, which makes it only slightly younger than Mariners pitching phenom Felix Hernandez).

In flips 1-2: tails 100% of the time
In flips 3-4: heads 100% of the time

You can see where the problem is: the coin can be in perfect shape, flipping it a 50/50 proposition, but in a small enough carving, it looks like the coin is ice cold and then red hot. But it's no more or less likely to come up heads or tails after it comes up heads twice.

Sample size may provide some insight into Ichiro's perceived struggles, as it turns out.

Assume that Ichiro has the ability to hit .336 consistently (his major league career average to date). I dusted off my old computer skills and built RoboIchiro 2000�, which ran Ichiro through 10 simulated seasons, giving him a 33.6% chance to get a hit each at-bat:

Roboseason Final batting average
1 .344
2 .329
3 .327
4 .334
5 .326
6 .320
7 .314
8 .317
9 .341
10 .311

RoboIchiro 2000's 10-year average here is .326 -- a full 10 points below his true average, and that's with more than 7,000 simulated at-bats. Over an increasing number of seasons, that average will get closer and closer to .336, but for any individual season, there's a wide range of possible outcomes. Within individual months, it gets even weirder.

Take that .341 season. Here's RoboIchiro 2000's monthly performances:

Month Average
April .388
May .310
June .345
July .310
August .345
September-October .342

Hey, with life-like early season comparisons to Ted Williams!

During another simulated season in which he hit .331, he had months of .259 and .267 (and a .457 July). There were long stretches in which he went hitless, and had long hitting streaks.

The point is not that Ichiro hits like a computer program, even though it sometimes seems that way. It's that you still see great variations in his performance even for a player who can consistently hit almost .340.

However, because Ichiro depends so greatly on his batting average, you can see where those variations come from. So many things happen every time Ichiro puts bat to ball that there's a lot of luck involved in whether, for that particular play, he reaches first safely or not. Take an infield grounder:

Where is it hit, and how hard? Who fields it, and does he field it cleanly? How strong and accurate is his arm, and does he make a good throw to first? Does the first baseman get to the base in time (or does the pitcher get to first before Ichiro)?

Sometimes the ball's going to elude a shortstop's glove by inches, and sometimes Ichiro's going to beat the throw to first by half a step (and sometimes, the ump's going to call him out anyway). Sometimes it finds the glove, and Ichiro's thrown out easily.

There's always going to be a lot of random fluctuation in Ichiro's game, and beyond that, he's human. He's been through slumps like this before, and for the rest of his career we're going to see him go through slumps balanced with scorching-hot streaks.

Whatever the causes of his problems in the past, we've seen Ichiro pull out of them before. He's constantly tinkering with his swing, looking to correct problems or find some tiny advantage, and it's worked for him thus far. We haven't seen anything to indicate that Ichiro's in the kind of serious trouble we should be worried about, or even that his struggles are that unusual for someone who plays his kind of all-average hitting game.

Derek Zumsteg is a co-founder of the authoritative blog "U.S.S. Mariner." His column will appear every Thursday on seattlepi.com. You can reach him by e-mailing newmedia@seattlepi.com

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